The wonderful thing about the atheist movement in this country is that it shows how all the vices that made religion repulsive can flourish in the complete absence of supernatural belief. The fruits of the movement are hypocrisy, humourlessness, meanness of spirit and triumphalist ignorance, all in the service of a determination that no one anywhere shall enjoy any pleasure or thought that is not approved by them. These tiny fringe bodies (the combined membership of the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association and all the rest, is less than 10,000) live only in their press releases.

So it seems bizarre to accuse them of wanting to promote a secular dictatorship. Isn't the ambition a little far from fulfilment? Yet the proposal to withdraw NHS funding for hospital chaplaincies, put forward by the National Secular Society's Terry Sanderson, is totalitarian in its ambitions: only those consolations of which Sanderson approves should be permitted on taxpayers' money. And it's obvious that if the group got its way, its next demand would be for the abolition of all chaplaincy services, however funded.

This kind of secularism has nothing to do with evidence or rationality, of course. The implicit claim of the NSS is that chaplains do nothing for the sick and presumably they would back this up with studies showing that intercessory prayer is more or less useless. But chaplains are not there to substitute for doctors. They are there to help carry the burden of wretchedness, which is an unavoidable part of dealing with the dying. They are there to give hope to the staff that their work matters as much as to give hope to patients. Hospitals are one of the few places where the observation that "There is probably no God, so stop worrying and get on with your life" appears as a sentiment of completely fatuous smugness.

The presence of chaplains in hospital is not just a salutary reminder of death. It is also an important reminder of just how alone and possibly mistaken we all are. The Catholic, the atheist, the Muslim and the Buddhist can't all be right. To allow each one to die according to their own beliefs is a recognition of our common humanity and one of the very few meaningful gestures that anyone can make in the presence of death.

Philip Larkin, an atheist who described religion "as the vast motheaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die" had to be shot full of valium to face his own death. It would have been vile to deny him that consolation or to charge him extra for it because it wasn't going to cure him. But it would be every bit as vile to deny to believers and half-believers the consolation that chaplains can offer – or even to charge their co-religionists for the privilege, as Sanderson wants.